Why This Manhattan Bar Is Best Enjoyed Alone

The Dead Rabbit in Lower Manhattan is one of the city's most celebrated bars, but the expertly crafted cocktails aren't the only reason to post up at the bar—be sure to check out its fascinating menu, too.

The Dead Rabbit, the much-lauded cocktail lounge tucked into an 1828-built townhouse near Wall Street, is one of the few places where drinking alone doesn't involve fidgeting with your phone, pretending to be waiting for a pal who never arrives, or fretting you’ll be mistaken for Norm from Cheers. Unlike a sports bar, though, which offers blaring TVs as social comfort, at the Dead Rabbit you can curl up with the bar book.

In lieu of a conventional cocktail list, co-owner Jack McGarry opted for a menu that does double duty as both palate-whetter and brain food. It intersperses his impressive, historically-inspired concoctions with a fascinating history of cocktail culture in downtown Manhattan: an extended essay recounting the efforts of early Prohibitioneer Lewis Morris Pease to stymie saloons sits alongside a cheeky article spotlighting New York’s best bars—in 1851.

It’s the third such tome McGarry has created with co-owner Sean Muldoon, introducing an entirely new conceit each February, on the anniversary of the bar's 2013 debut. The first outlined in detail how Manhattan became a cocktail mecca, with an essay by noted drinks historian Peter Quinn. The second was a graphic novel-style biography of John Morrissey, the street thug-turned-tycoon who deeded the nickname of his gang to the bar. (Morrissey’s hoodlums were known as the Dead Rabbits, since "dead raibead" in Irish Gaelic roughly translates a “A man very much to be afraid of.”)

Courtesy The Dead Rabbit

“We’ve always looked at our menus as a way of telling a story—and I mean really running with it," says McGarry. "They’re supposed to be multifunctional." The first menu took more than two and a half years to compile; the pair eked by, spending $50 on each sketch to illustrate the project whenever they could. (“We were absolutely broke—it was heartbreaking back then,” he notes.) Once the bar was thriving, their budgets expanded, and they spent almost $80,000 on the next two books, working with Northern Ireland-based graphics firm Drinksology, a specialist in menu design. Richard Ryan, Drinksology’s creative director, masterminded the painstaking efforts behind each menu, whether hiring a theologist to check their account of Morris Pease’s Bible-based objections to alcohol, or securing two days’ access to the secretive archives at Irish Distillers in Midleton, Ireland as background research for Morrissey’s story. “Basically, nobody gets through that door—most of the images we reproduced hadn’t been seen since the time they were taken,” says Ryan.

Ask politely, of course, and the barkeeps will gladly allow you to read either of these earlier menus, copies of which they still keep behind the bar. If you’re smitten with the storytelling, McGarry and Muldoon have just launched a box set that brings together each volume, signed by the owners, and available to take home for $140.

McGarry says that this year’s Prohibition-focused tome completes a trilogy, though he’s tight-lipped about next year’s version. “In terms of drinking in downtown Manhattan, we’ve told every story,” McGarry explains, “So now we’re taking things in a different direction.” He’s definitely not installing any TVs, though.